Thursday, May 10, 2018

President Horribilis — Iran

How disappointing that the opposition — the "resistance"
— did next to nothing to oppose or resist Trump's withdrawal from the nuclear
treaty with Iran.

Nothing about the withdrawal was a surprise. Trump kept
promising to do it. And given his manifold failures — to fully eviscerate
Obamacare, to get Mexico to splurge for a wall, to bring back coal etc. — it
seemed increasingly likely he would follow through on this particular boast: this
was the one big campaign pledge entirely within his power to fulfill, so he did.

Seems to me those of us who might have mounted or called for
at least a semblance of opposition, and I do not exclude myself, were bent over
with concerns about burnishing our critiques, fussing over just the right
historic parallels to bring up and the most acerbic phrases to use in describing
the nouveau conditions of the Trump presidency — that of President Horribilis.

It was, I felt often, as if there was some unannounced Grand
Prize for coming up with the best rhetorical flourish, the most thunderous damnation.

But while we were thundering, flourishing and damming, Trump,
by annulling the American stake in the Iran deal, has very simply moved the
United States, the Middle East, the world, close to a big war.

Sometimes, seems to me, the most politically astute among us
are blinded by our astuteness.

And I'm not in the least confident that we of the
resistance, of the opposition, have any idea of how to resist or oppose this
war, which is already coming at us in bits and pieces.